For the original music sheet with
lyrics, piano, guitar and vocal accompaniment in English, click here.
And for the French version, click here. To
see how well the song charted in Ottawa, click
here.

"It was 1967 that he wrote
Ca-na-da, which quickly became the most popular song of Canada's
centennial celebrations....Over the next few years, Ca-na-da sold
half a million copies. There were some 50 different recordings
of the song, and some 250 school choirs and bands recorded it.
In 1971, Gimby presented the original manuscript and all future
royalties to the Boy Scouts of Canada."

-- Alex Barris and
Ted Barris, authors of 'Making Music - Profiles from a Century of
Canadian Music.'

French version

English Version

French
Version

Click on the above "On
Air" images to listen to Bobby Gimby's "Canada" theme in either English or
French. The patriotic song would eventually earn him the Order of Canada
in 1967.

It's become a runaway, flag-waving
hit, and here's the wholesome, unabashedly patriotic bandleader who wrote
it: the Pied Piper of Confederation himself - Bobby Gimby!

Report written by Frank Rasky for the
now defunct, The Canadian, June 10, 1967.

PERFECT. Everybody at
Vickers and Benson agrees the image he projects is absolutely perfect for
the job.

The advertising agency, hired to
handle promotion for the Centennial Commission, was going out of its mind
last spring. It was looking for a gimmick that would kick off the campaign
to make Canadians aware they were about to celebrate their 100th
birthday.

"The government brass in Ottawa
had already settled on a centennial hymn and an anthem," recalls Al Scott,
executive vice-president of the ad agency. "But I knew neither would work.
Canadians tend to be complacent patriots. And the sophisticated city
slickers in the newspaper business have almost made it a sin to express
enthusiasm about our nation. What we needed was a grabber. A stirring
flag-waver that would make everybody feel, 'Gee, this is a real good
opportunity.'"

Then, one April morning, Bobby
Gimby walked into Vickers and Benson's Toronto office, brandishing the
song he had just written. Tapping out the rhythm with a pencil, blue eyes
blinking excitedly behind his square horn-rimmed spectacles, his 6-foot
165-pound figure crouched over the desk, his trumpeter's cheeks puffed out
like a gopher, Gimby sang out the bouncy lyrics of his Canada
song.

"It had real gut feeling,"
remembers Scott. "And when I realized the catch phrases alternated between
French and English...to be sung by children...I really flipped. We
needed the bilingual togetherness angle in our marketing campaign. And
even the wise guys in the communications dodge can't knock kids. So I knew
immediately I had found my grabber."

An absurdly youthful 46 who looks
like a boy cheerleader ("I was born enthusiastic"), Gimby comes from the
Saskatchewan whistlestop town of Cabri ("the train doesn't actually stop
there: it just hesitates").

He is a musician of the
old-fashioned, aw-shucks-Mom school ("Holy cripes! I'm still a naive
country boy at heart. Nothing I'd rather do than kick the leaves in the
fall on a little farm").

He deplores the groovy jargon of
jazz musicians ("I hate it when those haircutted hipsters talk of 'gig and
bag and broads and booze'") and he abhors their reputation as late-night
swingers fueled with pot and LSD.

Yet there is nothing amateurish
about his own musicianship ("I haven't spent 25 years in the high falutin'
music profession; I'm in the music business"). He is a
trumpet-playing graduate of TV's cornball Juliette Show and radio's even
cornier Happy Gang ("I'm strictly a low-key swinger; I swing andante
rather than allegro").

And he is responsible for five
Toronto society orchestras ("my apprenticeship with Mart Kenney and his
Western Gentlemen in Banff taught me that city folk really like
meat-and-potatoes music just as much as us folks from the
sticks").

He is also the composer of more
than 30 commercial jingles ("Here are the facts about Instant Maxwell
House coffee;" "Stay away from snacks...chew a Chiclets and relax.") of
about 15 novelty pop tunes (The Cricket Song: When Bessie The Cow Helped
Santa), and two rousing patriotic ballads to be sung by children (Little
People and Malaysia Forever - which virtually became national anthems in
Malaysia where they won him the nickname, "The Pied Piper From
Canada").

Indeed, his Canada song has
rapidly become the accepted anthem in our schools for centennial year, and
Gimby has been dubbed "The Pied Piper Of Canada: 1867-1967." Put
another way, it might be said by cynics that the government has gone into
the song-plugging business, and that Gimby is being paid an estimated
$35,000 a year to plug his own song.

But that would be unfair, for
both the Canada song and its composer seem to have captured the public
fancy on their own. "All we did was a little nudging to help them catch
on," says Al Scott. "But nobody at the agency ever dreamed they'd take off
the way they did."

The Centennial Commission bought
the Canada song outright for an unstated sum. (Gimby won't say how much,
but it's believed to be a "token" fee, with Gimby hoping that any profits
be channeled into children's charitable work.) At first, the plan was to
use it merely as opening background music for a 30-minute documentary
film, Preview '67, to be shown to centennial officials and once on the
CBC-TV network. After that, it was to have died a natural
death.

Ben McPeek, a Toronto arranger of
advertising jingles, got together eight experienced juvenile commercial
singers to sing the English part of the tune. Then, with appropriate
"holes" left in the tape, he flew to Montreal where Raymond Berthiaume led
a similar group of eight professional youngsters in singing the French
counter-melody.

While the results of the two
separate recording sessions were being fitted together, Toronto film
producer Paul Herriott arranged to have about 30 boys and girls released
for the day from their Grade 7 classes at Princess Margaret Public School
in Toronto's suburban Etobicoke. He filmed the untrained actors at nearby
Boyd Park, marching across hill and dale, waving banners, and bellowing
their school cheer.

When matched together, the
dubbed-in professional voices and the fresh-faced amateur performers
proved to be a wow on film. Tom Spaulding, design director of the
Confederation Train, recalls looking at it and exclaiming, "That music is
exactly the finishing touch we need for the last coach of our
train."

Al Scott recollects, "Every
centennial official was positively bowled over by that opening shot. They
ordered us to make a TV commercial of it real quick."

The ad agency was in such a hurry
that it simply clipped the first 60 seconds of the documentary, and it was
shown on every TV station in Canada for 26 weeks. Parents and school
teachers in each province, according to Scott, phoned the stations
clamoring to know, "Where can we get the words and music of that song done
by the kids marching through the fields?"

Gordon V. Thompson Ltd., the
Toronto music publishers, cautiously printed 10,000 copies of the sheet
music. With luck, the company hoped it might sell half the printing at 75
cents a copy. The first edition was sold out within five days. At the last
count, more than 50,000 copies have been published, and the orders keep
pouring in.

"I've never seen anything like it
during my 20 years in the Canadian music publishing business," says
Thompson president John Bird. "Three-year-old kids are dancing to it. High
school swimming classes want to swim to it. Bike riders want to cycle to
it, and drum corps want arrangements so they can beat a tattoo to it. By
the end of 1967, I predict every school choir, every school band, every
family with a piano in the parlor, will be playing it."

Quality Records, equally
conservative, scheduled last Christmas a first-run issue of several
thousand 45-rpm discs to sell at 99 cents each. Within 30 days orders had
piled up to a total of 75,000. Hiring extra staff and running overtime,
the record plant has so far made more than 200,000 copies of the Young
Canada Singers vocalizing the Canada song.

"It's an all-time smash
record-breaker for a Canadian song," says Ed Lawson, Quality promotion
manager. "On some radio station charts, it's even running ahead of The
Monkees! By the time tourists are through buying them at souvenir
concessions at Montreal's Expo, we expect to sell a minimum of a quarter
of a million." This would be the equivalent of God Bless America selling
2,500,000 in the U.S.

In addition, Lawson points out,
other record labels in Canada are putting out their versions, so that the
Canada song will be "folked, waltzed, rocked and Dixielanded."

It has been spoofed on the Allied
label (mimic Rich Little lisping and gargling his way through the lyrics à
la Pearson and Diefenbaker). It has been lampooned on the Sparton label (a
combo cryptically calling themselves the Department of Public Works
yammering the tune in the style of the Mamas and the Papas). More
dignified vocal arrangements are scheduled for release in the U.S.,
England, France, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Japan.

In other words, as Secretary of
State Judy LaMarsh has phrased it, the Canada song will undoubtedly be
"the only centennial project that will make money for the
government."

Gimby has profited by building
for himself an overnight national reputation as a sort of archetypal
Canadian troubadour. The Pied Piper is on salary with the Centennial
Commission for 18 months to pump up adult patriotism and rehearse school
choirs in singing his Canada song.

Originally, the Commission had
planned to restrict him to leading a parade of marching youngsters
whenever the Confederation Train arrived in the first official stop of
each province during its 63-city tour east across the country. The
Commissioners hadn't counted, though, on Gimby being such an engaging
showman.

His zest and rah-rah spirit are
so genuinely infectious that it sometimes seems he is being sought as an
emcee to preside over virtually every centennial project staged by the
hundreds of rural communities that will be visited by eight
tractor-trailer Confederation Caravans playing his song.

Last January, his flair for
showmanship was displayed at the official ceremony launching the
Confederation Train in Victoria, B.C. Gimby turned up at the Empress Hotel
wearing what he described as an 1867-style Pied Piper cape -- gold buttons
glittering on a two-tone green robe with a red lining.

He wielded what he called a
heraldic King Arthur's trumpet -- four feet long, festooned with bangles
and beads, and gaudy with 100-year-old pennies glued on to papier-mâché.
When he strutted at the head of the 40-voice boys' choir, dressed in their
green and blue tartan tams and vests, the spectators had something
magnificent to see as well as hear. (Gimby also carries around a
supply of Centennial tartan scarves for the children's choirs to
wear.)

"I was terribly worried, because
I knew the government was taking a gamble by going into show business,"
Gimby recalls. "But after we'd marched in the rain to the train and given
our performance, I saw a little old lady wiping tears from her eyes and
she was saying, 'I'm so proud to be a Canadian.' I thought to
myself, 'Holy cow! We've scored a bull's-eye.'"

Since then, Gimby seems to have
scored whenever he has made a personal appearance. Demands for his
presence are so pressing -- whether to adjudicate a band festival in Moose
Jaw, Sask., autograph his records in St. Paul, Alta., or tootle his horn
in front of 2,000 chanting youngsters as they parade past the Queen in
Ottawa on Dominion Day -- that Vickers and Benson's Robert Pugh, who
handles the Canada song for the Centennial Commission, spends a good deal
of his time steering Gimby through his hectic schedule. (His most
thrilling reception was at his hometown of Cabri, where the entire
population of 600 "spread the red carpet for me down on the gumbo mud and
- oh, boy! - actually presented me with the key to the city.")

His 23-year-old daughter, Lynn, a
former CBC makeup artist, has accompanied him from coast to coast to wipe
the perspiration off his brow between performances and to answer the
bag-loads of mail he receives in each community. (Most are from would-be
songwriters submitting centennial anthems of their own, and one of them, a
woman poet, suggested that her verses be set to the tune of Yankee Doodle
Dandy.)

Instant stardom does not appear
to have swollen Gimby's head. He has endured more than 150 press, radio
and TV interviews across the nation, and according to all reports, has
conducted himself with unfailing modesty and tact.

He never seems to tire of being
asked: "How did you come to write the Canada song?"

"The idea first came to me when I
was playing an orchestra date at Manoir Richelieu in La Malbaie, Que.,
back in the summer of 1964," he replies. "On St. Jean Baptiste Day I saw
about 50 kids parading through the streets. The boys were dressed in
quaint sacking material, and the girls had flowers in their hair, and they
were all singing some delightful folk song in French.

"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be
wonderful if the French and English kids of this great country could pull
together and sing a sing in their own language?'

"Well, that thought stuck in my
mind for a whole year. When I finally sat down to write the song, the
first eight bars sprang on to the paper instantly. But it took months,
working nights in my Toronto apartment and ripping up many pages of false
attempts in the morning, before it came out nice and simple."

There is no easy formula for
writing popular songs, he says. When inspiration eludes him, he glances
through the pages of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations in hope that some
passage will percolate ideas. And when that doesn't work, he
unblushingly admits he rereads the children's stories of Thornton W.
Burgess. "Gosh, it's amazing," he says in wonderment, "what an inspired
message you'll find in the adventures of Jimmy Skunk and Reddy
Fox."

His daughter, Lynn, can recall
only one interview that ever fazed her father. He was a guest on a radio
hot-line phone-answer show in Vancouver late one night when a slightly
sauced woman called up in a highly sultry voice.

"Bobby, do you remember me?" she
said, giving her name.

"Afraid I don't,
ma'am."

"Surely you have memories of that
romantic August evening 28 years ago?"

"Sorry, ma'am. It doesn't ring a
bell."

"Under a harvest moon, when you
and I were out on the pasture near Cabri?"

A long silence.

"We were out on a hayride
together, and you were playing your trumpet."

"Holy gosh!" A gulp of relief.
"Darned nice of you to remember me, ma'am." A hurried goodbye, and a
quicker clicking down of the receiver.

"Daddy claims he didn't lose his
cool," remembers Lynn Gimby with a smile, "but he was sure sweating
heavily that night."

- End of article. Copyright by
The Canadian magazine, June 10, 1967. All rights reserved.

Bobby Gimby was born in
Cabri, near Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan on October 25, 1918. He
died in June 1998, in his 80th year.

-- Source: "Making Music: Profiles from a
Century of Canadian Music" by Alex Barris and Ted Barris,
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.,
2001.

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